


goal-oriented mindset

by BeatriceEagle



Category: DCU (Comics), Nightwing (Comics)
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Past Rape/Non-con, Resurrection, Stalking, and doesn't entirely apply here anyway but, i feel like this fic should have a bad restorative justice etiquette tag, is not a tag that exists on this site, restorative justice, that's the gist, you know the bad bdsm etiquette tag?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-13
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 22:28:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27543859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeatriceEagle/pseuds/BeatriceEagle
Summary: “Well?” Dick says, after a moment. “What is it that’s so important? What did you have to say to me that the first thing you did after getting out of Hell was—”“I went to Hell,” Catalina says. “I died, and I went to Hell, and I showed Neron my get-out-of-Hell-free card, and he let me go. But before I left, I asked him to tell me… what it was, that I did, that sent me there. All the things I did.”_____Catalina Flores dies, goes to Hell, comes back, and makes a plan.
Comments: 13
Kudos: 82





	goal-oriented mindset

**Author's Note:**

> Things you need to know from the comics that you might not know:
> 
> \- In Secret Six (2008), a team of mercenaries break Tarantula out of Alcatraz (where she's been imprisoned) at the behest of a _deeply_ sadistic but also deeply fucked-up crime lord named Junior. Junior wants Tarantula because she stole a card from him that entitles the bearer to Get Out of Hell Free, if they die while holding it. Then there's a big showdown on a bridge in Gotham between Junior and all of his villain lackeys, and Tarantula and the Secret Six. Tarantula grabs hold of Junior, saying she's holding the Get Out of Hell Free card, and the villain lackeys kill them both. In the comics, Tarantula is lying, and one of the Secret Six actually has the card. In this AU, Tarantula was not lying.
> 
> \- Also in Secret Six, it's revealed that Catalina has a sister who lives in California, and is completely unconnected to the vigilante world.
> 
> \- In War Games, Tarantula follows Nightwing to Gotham, and ends up taking over a Gotham street gang, which takes on the Tarantula colors and starts going by Las Arañas. At the time, the gangs in Gotham are all at war, and Tarantula is answering to Batman, trying to keep her gang out of trouble. Under Tarantula's leadership, Las Arañas become less violent and more community-oriented.  
>    
> **Warnings, and please pay attention to these:**
> 
> This fic is from the point of view of a rapist. There is no explicit rape or non-con in it, but a significant portion of the fic is a conversation between a rapist and the person that she raped, about the rape. That conversation **is not initiated by the survivor** , but by the perpetrator. This fic also contains activity that could fairly be described as stalking, from a rapist towards the person she raped, and just general boundary-pushing. **All of this is addressed within the fic.**
> 
> This fic also contains significant references to, though not depiction of, domestic violence between minor offscreen original characters.
> 
> I want to make it really clear that although this is a fic about Catalina, this is **not** a redemption fic; it's not a fic about excusing, forgiving, or even really making up for any of the things she's done. This fic is an attempt to understand Catalina's often confused and contradictory canon characterization, and to do so **without** trivializing any of the harms she's caused.

Catalina comes back to the world just where she left it: On the edge of the Trigate Bridge, overlooking the river leading into Gotham.

It’s morning. Early morning, still the time of day when capes and masks prowl Gotham’s streets, which is good, because Catalina is wearing the clothes she died in. The bright orange of the Tarantula outfit catches attention even at night—it was _designed_ to catch attention—but at the moment, Catalina is seeing the benefits of blending in.

The bridge is empty now, so some time must have passed since she died. All the combatants—the villains and the reformed villains and the people just out for themselves—have dispersed. Has it been a day? A year? A decade? She doesn’t know.

Catalina has no money, no transportation, and nowhere to go. Either the world thinks she’s dead, or she’s wanted for breaking out of jail.

She starts to walk.

#

Catalina has never gone through the world without a plan. It’s not always a good plan, it’s not always a plan that works, and sometimes the plan changes without even warning her, but she is not a woman who wanders.

By the time she steps off the Trigate Bridge, her immediate future is lining up ahead of her, like soldiers falling into formation. She has an ultimate goal in mind, but before she can get there, she needs information. Resources. Support. And if there’s anywhere in the world where Catalina Flores will still be welcomed, it’s the Gotham Bowery.

To get there, she has to go through a posher part of town—a place where people might take notice of a woman in a bright orange mask, even at 4 a.m. As she creeps through the alleyways, she hears Nightwing’s voice in the back of her head: _“You don’t have to make a scene. Stick to the shadows.”_

She makes it to the Bowery just as dawn is breaking. This part is actually more dangerous than the theater district. To get to the three blocks of the Bowery where Las Arañas used to live and work, she has to pass through LoBoys territory—or at least what used to be LoBoys territory—and the LoBoys hate her. She beat the hell out of one of their lieutenants, once. And she doesn’t even have her guns.

(And even if she did, could she use them, now? Knowing what she does?)

There’s no sticking to the shadows, in the Bowery. The shadows are where you go to disappear in a bad way. So Catalina walks boldly down the street in her orange and black, and hopes her luck holds.

It more than holds: It improves. Two blocks into what apparently is no longer LoBoys territory, someone calls to her. “ _Tarantula?_ ”

Catalina drops out of her defensive stance almost before it can take hold. The voice calling to her is surprised, but not upset, and when she turns to face it, she sees Olga Lozano. Short, square-faced, clear-eyed, pockmarked Olga, the highest-ranking female lieutenant from Las Arañas, inasmuch as Las Arañas had had lieutenants, or indeed, ranks. A friend.

“The one and only,” Catalina says. She tries for a shit-eating grin. It feels like she’s just eaten shit.

“I thought you were in Alcatraz!”

“It’s a long story. Can we take it inside?”

“I gotta get to work.” Olga looks up and down the street, and then at the clothes Catalina’s wearing. “You’re really in it, aren’t you?”

“I really am.”

Olga reaches into her pleather purse and pulls out a keychain. It’s the same keychain she had when Catalina last saw her: “I Got Smashed At the Gotham Monster Truck Rally.” She pulls a key off and hands it to Catalina.

“This is to my apartment. That building over there, unit 7B. The fridge is yours, and change into some better clothes, okay? I’ll be off at 3.”

Food. Clothes. A safe place to regroup. The immediate future is shaping up.

Olga starts to take off, but Catalina catches her wrist. “Olga. Thank you.”

“ _Anything_ for you, Cat. Now get off the street.”

So Catalina does.

#

The last time Catalina was in Olga’s apartment, she’d lived three blocks north of here, with her boyfriend, Hector, who was also in Las Arañas. Hector was fine. No Nightwing—who was?—but he didn’t hit Olga, and he paid his half of the rent.

There’s no sign of Hector in Olga’s new apartment. It’s a studio, just a twin bed and a television and a sagging old armchair that Catalina remembers from the old place, and a little half kitchen off to the side. No men’s clothes in the dresser, no pictures of Hector on the wall. But there are pictures of Olga’s sister Carla, and of Olga in a white cap and gown. That’s new.

Catalina changes into a pair of Olga’s sweatpants—an inch too short and an inch too wide, but who’s counting?—and digs a carton of kung pao chicken that looks like it’s probably less than a week old out of the fridge, then turns on the TV.

From the local news, she learns that it has been six months since she died. She also learns that your laundry detergent may be killing you, and that a cold front is moving in from the northwest. But if the local caped community has been up to anything, the news hasn’t caught wind of it. They don’t mention Batman once—let alone the hero she’s really interested in.

As promised, Olga comes home just after 3. She makes huevos rancheros for lunch, and she and Catalina eat cross-legged on her bed.

“Where’ve you been?” Olga asks. “I looked you up. People think you’re _dead_.”

Catalina tells her the truth—or some of it. She leaves out the dying and going to Hell part. It’s not that she doesn’t trust Olga, but some people are part of the world where people die and get magically resurrected, and some people aren’t, and it’s better to leave the people in the latter group where they are for as long as possible.

“I didn’t break out, if that’s what they’re saying,” Catalina says. “I was kidnapped, pretty much. This crime boss I stole from a _lifetime_ ago hired a bunch of mercenaries to bring me to him.”

“So… you’re on the run?”

“No, he’s dead, now.” Catalina knows Olga will assume that she killed Junior herself, and she doesn’t correct the assumption. It’s close enough to the truth. “But I’ve got no money, no friends, and like you said, everyone thinks I’m dead. And if I tell them I’m not, well. Nobody’s gonna believe I didn’t break out myself.”

Olga pouts for a moment—she always did do that when she was thinking—then says, “Well, I can’t help you with being dead. But I can tell you that you’re wrong about two things. My money is your money. And you’ve got at least one friend.”

Catalina is not one to cry, and she’s not one to turn down favors. But she knows how big this is. She takes Olga’s hand. “Olga.”

“After what you did for Carla? Come on.”

Carla’s boyfriend, Donny, _had_ hit her. Olga had been losing her mind, trying to get Carla to leave. Finally, Carla had said she was ready, but she had nowhere to go, and she was scared. Well, who wouldn’t be? So Catalina had found another member of Las Arañas who had space on her couch for Carla while she was getting her feet under her, and she’d gone with Olga to get Carla’s things from the house, staring Donny down with her hand on her gun the whole time. She’d kept an eye on the apartment where Carla was staying for two weeks after, and when Donny inevitably showed up, she’d scared him off. And once more, a month after that, when Carla had given her a call.

“I’d have done the same thing for anyone,” Catalina says. “I’ve got a sister.”

“You saved her life,” Olga says.

“How is Carla?”

“Donny got arrested. B&E. But her new boyfriend…”

“Jesus,” Catalina says. “When I’ve got my feet under me, you just say the word.”

“So you’ve got plans?”

Not big-picture, rest-of-her-life plans, no. But for her immediate plans, she needs information. “Olga, do you know anything about what Nightwing’s been up to lately?”

#

She spends the night at Olga’s. At first they talk about Nightwing, what little Olga knows of his activity; then they talk about what became of Las Arañas after Catalina’s arrest, and what Olga’s been up to for the past two years. After Olga goes to sleep, Catalina stays up, using her phone to google for more information on Dick Grayson. It doesn't take long, ultimately, to find what she needs.

In the morning—before the sun rises—Catalina says goodbye to Olga, with $50 and another change of clothes in a reusable shopping bag that Olga had given her. Dick Grayson’s social media—mostly locked down, but accessible through occasional glimpses of his friends' pages—indicates that he's living in, of all places, Gotham Village. Putting that together with the most frequent recent Nightwing sightings, Catalina had been able to narrow him down to a single building, and once you had a general address for someone, it was shockingly easy to confirm exactly where they lived with a simple google search.

The buses don’t run from The Bowery at 4 am, so she walks to Grand Ave and picks one up from there. She's standing outside Nightwing’s apartment building by 4:20.

There isn’t much truly old construction in Gotham anymore, not since the quake, but whoever rebuilt this building did a good job of matching the top three stories to the bottom three, which look like they were constructed in the 1920s. Nightwing lives on the top floor—of course—but that's no problem. Catalina scales the fire escape and climbs in through the window. There's no particularly advanced security on it.

Or that's what she thinks, until two minutes later, when Nightwing himself somersaults through the window, escrima sticks already extended, to greet her.

“Who are you, and what are— _Tarantula_?” He does _not_ sound like Olga when he says it.

Catalina raises her hands over her head. “Guilty.”

“What the _fuck_ are you doing in my apartment? Aren’t you… I thought you were dead.” He does not lower his weapons.

“I was. I came back.”

It’s hard to read his expression behind the mask, but judging by the length of the pause before he speaks, there’s _something_ complicated happening in Nightwing’s head.

“Huntress said you died to save everyone from Junior. That Junior wanted some kind of card that… gets you out of Hell.”

“That’s right.”

“So you died, and…”

“And went to Hell. And got out.”

“And broke into my apartment.”

“There’s some things I think we should talk about,” Catalina says.

“You couldn’t have called first?”

“They didn’t really spit me out of Hell with a cell phone.”

Nightwing stares at her for a moment, then spins on his heel.

“Where are you going?” Catalina asks.

He keeps walking away as he answers. “I’m getting changed. You want to talk? Fine. We can talk somewhere else.”

Catalina hears the door to his room lock behind him.

#

They walk to Robinson Park. It’s really too early to be in the park—still not quite light out—but neither of them is particularly scared of crime.

Dick—he’s in civvies, now, slim black jeans, a bright blue shirt, and a faux calfskin jacket that more-or-less swallows him, so she should call him Dick, though she never really has before—leads her to a picnic table and sits down. He stares pointedly at the bench across from him until she sits down on it.

“So,” he says.

“So,” Catalina says, and suddenly, she’s out of words. Catalina is never out of words. She always has a plan, and having a plan means knowing what to do, knowing what to say. But she’s never done anything like this.

“Well?” Dick says, after a moment. “What is it that’s so important? What did you have to say to me that the first thing you did after getting out of Hell was—”

“I went to Hell,” Catalina says. “I died, and I went to Hell, and I showed Neron my get-out-of-Hell-free card, and he let me go. But before I left, I asked him to tell me… what it was, that I did, that sent me there. All the things I did.”

Catalina twists the strap of the reusable shopping bag around her fingers, untwists it. Twists it again. She glances up at Dick. Unmasked, his expression is just as unreadable as it was under the domino.

“I knew, when I died, where I was probably going. I knew I’d done bad things, made some bad choices. I hoped that maybe the good I did, the sacrifice at the end, would balance it out. But it didn’t. And I wanted to know. Just what was weighing against me.”

She waits for Dick to ask. He doesn’t.

“A lot of it was what you’d expect. The people I killed. Even seeing it like that, I don’t feel bad about killing Redhorn, you know? I just don’t. Maybe Hell thinks I deserve to be punished for that, but I think, screw Hell. That bastard was hurting my city.”

“There were better ways to take him down than killing him,” Dick says, speaking for the first time. “I cleaned up the BPD from the inside.”

“Yeah? How’d that work out, in the end?”

Dick doesn’t answer. He doesn’t look away, but he doesn’t answer.

Catalina sighs. “This isn’t what I wanted to talk about.”

“What _do_ you want to talk about?”

“The other stuff. The stuff I wasn’t expecting to see. The circus was on there.”

Dick flinches. Part of Catalina is pleased to have finally gotten a reaction out of him. She’s familiar with that. Another part of her is ashamed at the first part. That’s entirely new.

“I wasn’t involved in any of the planning,” Catalina says. “And I told myself at the time, that because of that, because I didn’t know about it when it was happening, and because I broke it off with Blockbuster right after, that it didn’t have anything to do with me. That none of those people’s deaths were on me. But I knew who Blockbuster was. I knew the kinds of things he did. And I helped him anyway. And I didn’t even have a good reason. I wasn’t trying to protect anyone—I was just angry at you.”

“So angry you teamed up with a metahuman crime lord to destroy my life.”

“Yeah.”

“And who cares about collateral damage.”

Catalina wraps her entire hand in the strap of her bag and pulls as hard as she can. Dick is angry, now—that special, cold kind of angry that he gets—and she can’t blame him. “Yeah. That’s what I’m saying. I didn’t think about it at all, until John Law died.”

“Why are you telling me this, Catalina?” You could freeze to death in his eyes.

“Because… when I left Hell, it wiped my slate clean. All the things I did, they won’t count against me, when I die again. I get a whole new life. And I want to do this one right. And I think that has to start with _making_ things right, for the people I hurt. And I don’t think I hurt anyone as much as you.”

“Jesus Christ.” Dick folds over, head on his hands on his elbows on the table. “Jesus Christ. You’re trying to _atone_. Jesus _Christ_.”

“Is there something wrong with that?”

Dick looks up, and he sure has an expression now—twenty of them, at least, packed into one face. He jumps up from the bench and starts to pace.

A suspicion starts to grow in Catalina. She’d been hoping to avoid this, but that’s cowardice, probably, and not a very good start to her clean slate.

“Is this about what we did on the rooftop?” She stops, thinks, amends. “Is this about what _happened_ on the rooftop?”

Dick stills in his pacing.

“No,” he says, and for a moment, Catalina thinks it’s his answer, but then he continues. “No. You do not get to _break into my apartment_ , and drag up all this history, and try to atone, and bring up… _No_.”

He whirls on her. “I’m going for a walk. Stay the fuck where you are.”

Catalina wouldn’t move for the end of the world.

#

Dick is gone for a long time.

Catalina watches the light grow strong, and the park fill with people, and she gets hungry, and her ass goes numb, and she thinks.

Maybe she was wrong to come see Nightwing. Or maybe she did it the wrong way. Breaking into his apartment _was_ a little aggressive. She could’ve written a letter. But Catalina isn’t used to half-measures, to the roundabout path. And she’d wanted to see him.

Somewhere down in Hell, she can imagine this morning’s events getting etched on a fresh new slate.

When the passersby have stopped carrying pastries and start carrying hot dogs, Dick returns. He drops back onto the bench, looking exhausted. He was out all night, Catalina remembers suddenly. He still hasn’t slept.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“What for?”

“Breaking into your apartment.”

Dick sighs. “Well, it’s something.”

He hands her a hot dog. Plain, with mustard. It’s not how she takes them, but then, how would he know?

“Thanks,” she says, and eats.

When she’s done, Dick says, “So. What happened on the roof.”

Catalina crumples up the paper wrapper the hot dog came in. “It was… on my list. In Hell.”

“Oh, yeah? What did your list say?”

He says it like a challenge, but now _he’s_ the one fidgeting, spinning the empty to-go cup of coffee he brought with him, and maybe Catalina doesn’t know him as well as she used to think she did, but she has inside information on this one. She knows he’s afraid of the answer. Probably as afraid as she is to say it.

“It said I raped you.”

Dick swallows. Swallows again. Nods.

“You know, I know someone,” he says, “someone I care about, who’s… like you, in a lot of ways. He’s killed people, a lot of people, for reasons he thought were good reasons, and he’s hurt some people just because… because there was something he wanted, or thought he needed, so desperately, and that was the only path he could see to getting it. I don’t agree with what he’s done, and I wish he would choose differently, but I do understand him. Why he is the way he is, and why he acts that way.”

He looks at her, straight in the eye, and his voice shakes. “But he’s never raped anyone.”

Catalina wants to say something, but the only thing that comes to mind is, _Good for him_ , and she may be fucking this whole thing up, but she’s _trying_.

“I can understand most of what you did,” Dick says. “You were angry at me. You lashed out. You saw bad men. You killed them. Selfish, angry, short-sighted. I get that. I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t.”

“You didn’t kill—”

“We’re not talking about what I did right now.” It’s as close as he’s come to yelling since he came back. Catalina shuts up.

“What I don’t understand,” Dick says, “is looking at someone who can’t breathe, someone who’s shaking, who tells you not to touch them, and having sex with them anyway. While they just lie there. Hyperventilating. I can’t imagine doing that. Can you explain that to me?”

The description is worse than the word. In Catalina’s memory, it doesn’t look like that. In her memory, Nightwing says, _Don’t touch me_ , but then he calms down. He comes around. She remembers him shaking, she remembers him hyperventilating, but that was _before_ the sex. _During_... well, during, she hadn’t been paying much attention to him at all.

“I didn’t think of it as rape,” she says. “At the time. I was… trying to help.”

Dick scoffs. Catalina almost laughs; she doesn’t think she’s ever heard anyone actually scoff out loud before.

“You were trying to help?” he says. “By doing what I told you not to? Undressing me while I stared into space?”

Why _had_ she thought it would help?

“And why did you want to help me anyway? You were basically trying to kill me a week earlier.”

“You made me feel things.”

Dick stares at her, and she knows she’s going to have to explain better.

“With me, love, hate, it’s all just part of… of passion. There are people in this world who I just disdain. People like Redhorn, like Blockbuster. But you… you just lit me up, and some days it was this awful, burning thing, where I’d hate you, and some days it was like, set my heart aflame. And I wanted to help you.”

“By fucking me,” Dick says. Short. Bitter.

“I didn’t realize. I didn’t know that you were… that I was hurting you.”

“I told you not to touch me. I wasn’t _moving_.”

“I wasn’t…” Catalina stops.

“What?” Dick leans forward. Catalina remembers, from several lifetimes ago, interrogations at an FBI field office. “You weren’t what?”

“I wasn’t paying all that much attention to you.”

“You wanted to help me, but you weren’t paying attention to me.”

“I thought it would help me. I thought if it would help me, it would help you. And I was thinking about how alive I felt, and not about… well, not about you.”

Dick sits back. “So it wasn’t about helping me. It wasn’t about me at all. It was about you. Taking what you wanted.”

Helplessly, Catalina shrugs. “Yes.”

They just sit, for a few breaths. A family walks by: A mom in a sweater and Ugg boots, a little girl in mismatched leggings and shirt, a truly ugly dog on a leash.

“I have a sister,” Catalina says. “When I was sixteen, she—”

“I don’t want to hear about your sister.”

A few more breaths.

“I never imagined myself as a person who would do something like this,” she tries again. “And when I saw it on the list I wanted to write it off, like Redhorn. But I _did_ kill Redhorn, whether or not I think it’s worth going to Hell for. And I realize now that I… raped you.”

“You should’ve realized then.”

 _Even_ you _didn’t realize then_ , Catalina wants to say. _You almost married me._ She does not say it. She suspects it would gain her points with neither Nightwing nor Hell.

“I should’ve,” she says. She squeezes her bag between her hands and takes a deep breath. “Dick. I’m sorry.”

There’s a soft scraping sound; it takes a moment for Catalina to realize that Dick is grinding his teeth. If he were one of Las Arañas, she would pull his jaw open and tell him to quit the habit before he wears his molars down. 

He is not one of Las Arañas, and it is probably a bad idea for Catalina to comment on anything he does, just this second.

“I’ve thought about this conversation, you know,” he says. “What I would say if I saw you. What I would want you to know. In my head you never apologized. Of course, you never broke into my apartment, either.”

“So what do you want me to know?”

Dick shakes his head. “I don’t want you to know anything. Except this, because it’s fucking important, and you need to remember it: I want you to know that you hurt me. For a long time I thought, or I pretended, or I… assumed that it was just about Blockbuster, but it wasn’t. What you did to me _hurt_ me. So if you’re really serious about this clean slate, you won’t hurt anyone else like that, ever again.”

“You’re not going to turn me in?” Talking to Nightwing had been the last step in Catalina’s plan, and if it had led to her going back to prison… She hadn’t decided yet, what her plan for that would be.

Dick laughs. “You’re _dead_ , Catalina. In front of like 100 witnesses. They filed the paperwork and everything. Even if I _did_ turn you in, I’m not sure they could put you back in jail.”

“Same rules as Hell?”

“Maybe.”

“So what are you going to do?”

Dick twirls his coffee cup again. “When I heard you were dead, I was relieved.”

Catalina stops herself from interrupting, from defending herself, from saying, _Was I really that bad?_. He just got done telling her that she was. She’d known, anyway, when she died, that it wouldn’t be a large funeral.

“I don’t like feeling that way about people dying,” he says. “But I just thought… Now I can stop thinking about her.”

He looks up at her. “That’s what I want. I want to feel that way again.”

“You want me to die?”

 _Ouch_. His glare stabs right through her. “No. I want to never have to think about you again.”

“So what does that mean?”

“That means you’re going to go live your new life. Somewhere that I never have to hear about you. Help people, if you want. Or don’t. I don’t care. It means you’re not going to hurt anyone, and you’re not going to kill anyone, not because of what Hell thinks, but because if you do, I’ll have to get involved, and that would mean that I would have to think about you. And it means that after this conversation, you will never speak to me, you will never come near me, you will never contact me, ever again.

“You want atonement, Catalina? That’s the best I’ve got.”

Like Dick, Catalina has imagined this conversation. When she was in prison, she spent a lot of time imagining really letting loose on Nightwing, letting him know just what an asshole he was. As time went by, her anger faded, but she still imagined talking to him, the way she imagined talking to her sister, to Mateo even; prison left a lot of time for thought, and a lot of space for loneliness. She imagined telling Nightwing about her day, about the way her appeal was progressing, about anything that crossed her mind.

And then, since Hell, she's imagined this specific conversation, the one where she sits across from Nightwing and apologizes. It's been the goal she's been working towards, in fact. But in no version of her imagination did this conversation end with Nightwing telling her to leave so that _he_ never has to imagine _her_ again.

Catalina believes in evil. She believes in its mundanity and its perversion. She's seen it in a deadbeat boyfriend and a ruthless metahuman crime lord and a sad, sadistic, broken human being on a bridge. She knows that evil sneaks up on you, that it's hard to root out, that it lives in every human being for a billion reasons too complicated to name. She knows it grows from systems as much as from any one person, and that they are all of them, every breathing being on the planet, part of _some_ creeping, sucking system.

And yet she never expected to sit across from a man she cares about—a man she's almost certain she has cared about—and hear him tell her to never speak to him again, because she hurt him. Because she committed a crime against him.

Did she think she had escaped the system?

No. Not really. But she hadn't realized how deep into it she was.

"Okay," she says.

"Okay?" Dick says, like it can't be that easy. Probably he's right.

"Okay," Catalina repeats. She stands up. "Goodbye, Dick."

She wishes she could call him Nightwing for her goodbye, but they're in public. She won't risk his identity again.

"Goodbye, Catalina."

Catalina looks at him, one last time. His fist is clenched in his lap. She thinks he's grinding his teeth again. She wants to know all the things he imagined telling her over the years. She wants to know if he knows that he didn't kill Blockbuster, really. She wants to know just how she hurt him, and whether he's doing better. She wants to know if this conversation helped.

Those aren't things she gets to know.

Catalina turns around, and lets her last image of Dick Grayson fall away from her eyes. She sets her sights for the park exit, and from there to the bus stop, and from there to Olga's apartment.

Help people, or don't. Catalina chooses to help people.

A new plan falls into place.


End file.
